Dangerous Concessions: Red Hat, Fedora and the Secure Boot Shocker

"Microsoft will be offering signing services through their sysdev portal," wrote Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett late last month. "It ensures compatibility with as wide a range of hardware as possible and it avoids Fedora having any special privileges over other Linux distributions. ... So, in all probability ... our first stage bootloader will be signed with a Microsoft key." How innocent words can seem when taken apart from their meaning; put in context, the result was nothing short of a bomb going off in the Linux blogosphere's main downtown.